Navy Secretary John Phelan was unceremoniously sacked on April 22. The Navy secretary is responsible for training, supplying, and organizing the service as well as a host of other administrative tasks that are essential, including building more ships more quickly. However, the days when Lincoln’s navy secretary, Gideon Welles, exercised direct control over naval operations are long gone.
The same disconnect exists today between military service chiefs and operational control of forces. The former do not maintain operational control over the latter. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s dismissal of U.S. Army Chief of Staff Randy George was remarkable not for its impact, but its lack of impact on operational issues. The reality is that the Iran war has demonstrated the extraordinary power the Joint Staff wields, compared to the service chiefs.
The Joint Staff is the central operational staff of the U.S. military. Made up of senior and mid-level military officers and some civilians, it reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are composed of the chiefs of each of the U.S. military’s services — the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Space Force.
This is profoundly relevant for the balance between soldiers and statesmen and bodes ill for the future of American strategy. The solution is legislative: Congress must re-empower the services in budgetary and strategic terms, including giving them direct military access to the president.
Since the Vietnam War, the military has benefited from a certain professional mystique. Just under 20 years after American de facto defeat in Vietnam, the U.S. military had transitioned from a conscript force to a fully professional one. It had birthed a new military doctrine, AirLand Battle, that fused cutting-edge computer technology with airpower and long-range weapons to transform the military balance with the USSR. Crucially, it won a resounding victory over the million-man Iraqi military in late February 1991, ejecting it from Kuwait while suffering extraordinarily light casualties, all without getting bogged down in the dreaded quagmire of occupation and stabilization.
This professional redemption, which remains a foundational intellectual and mythic one for the U.S. military, essentially relieves the uniformed military of responsibility for American strategic mistakes. Casualties incurred during the U.S. intervention in Somalia in 1993 were blamed on Secretary of Defense Les Aspin (according to the media narrative), members of Congress, and the military establishment, all of which were accused of providing insufficient military support. Throughout the 1990s, the U.S. used force with extraordinary caution, prioritizing force protection over actual tangible effect, resulting in indecisive campaigns in the Balkans whose lack of results were blamed on civilian leadership, not military planners.
Then came the early 2000s Global War on Terror. The initial interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wildly successful — both demonstrating the sheer scale of American military power in unique ways. Yet both interventions resulted in unsatisfying protracted wars. As the Iraqi insurgency exploded, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his civilian team were pilloried for their lack of strategic foresight, while American military leadership rested on the myth of its supposed prudence and skill. A similar story occurred in Afghanistan, with civilian leadership being blamed for strategic listlessness, unlike the always professional, politically neutral military.
Misfortune has many fathers, but the point is that it comes not only from civilian mistakes, but also from military ones.
Read the rest at National Review.
Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute.
